With all due respect to the jaunty good cheer of Jessica Fletcher and Lord Peter Wimsey, the best fictional detectives wear their melancholy like a rumpled old trench coat. Few don it more proudly than Edinburgh private eye Jackson Brodie, the gruff-but-tender hero of Case Histories, an enjoyable trio of shows (based on the best-selling novels by Kate Atkinson) that brings an offbeat touch to the new season of PBS’s MASTERPIECE MYSTERY!

Jason Isaacs stars as Brodie, a transplanted Yorkshireman haunted by all he’s lost (his policeman’s badge, his murdered sister, his marriage) yet unable to stop playing the knight errant—he has a soft touch for anyone with a problem. And so, in episode one, he gets sucked into three cases: Two sisters, Julia (Natasha Little) and Amelia Land (Fenella Woolgar), ask him to look for another sister who went missing 30 years earlier; a grieving father (touchingly played by Phil Davis) wants him to find out who killed his daughter; and a seductive nurse, Shirley (Shauna Macdonald), enlists him in the search for her vanished teenage niece. Although these family tragedies at first seem random, they soon start overlapping and reflecting one another. And Brodie finds himself being surrounded, if not engulfed, by women—from the hot-to-trot alluring actress, Julia, to a crazy old cat-woman (Sylvia Syms) to his old police colleague D.C. Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbingdon) who clearly fancies him. But the one who actually owns his heart is his young daughter, Marlee (Millie Innes), who, on his custody days, becomes his companion in looking for clues.

Case Histories was adapted for the screen by writer Ashley Pharoah, creator of the hit series Life on Mars, who clearly found himself in a bit of a pickle. You see, Atkinson’s novels don’t unfold like ordinary detective stories. Richly conceived and deftly written, they slowly coalesce, weaving together family history, black comedy, urban sadness, and a quietly feminist sense that—Brodie notwithstanding—women’s stories are actually far more interesting than men’s. All this is hard to get into a two-hour detective show, and though Pharoah tries to preserve Case Histories’s novelistic DNA, the series winds up feeling safely conventional, from the too-neat plotting to the incessantly whimsical humor (so beloved of British crime series) that cheats life-and-death questions of their proper seriousness.

Luckily, the series has plenty of other pleasures, from the use of the Scottish setting—Edinburgh’s lovely Old Town and moody countryside—to actors who often appear to take the material more seriously than their directors. The whole series is filled with nifty small turns, especially by Little’s Julia, who perfectly nails the flightly narcissistic warmth of a small-time actress, and by the charmingly brisk Abbingdon, who gives us a pert, likable D.C. Munroe whose exasperation with Brodie can’t mask her attraction. It’s easy to see what’s drawing her. Best known as the sinister Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, Isaacs is a darkly handsome man with a striking beak and the air of one who feels life deeply without splashing around in himself. At once two-fisted and sympathetic, he becomes the reassuring private eye we’d all like to know. He’s able to walk down Edinburgh’s mean streets without himself ever becoming mean.

The last time I regularly watched CSI—the Las Vegas original, not the later franchises —the crime-scene nerds were still being overseen by William Petersen’s Gil Grissom, a know-it-all who dispensed fortune-cookie lines like “The rich are just as depraved as the poor” with the self-satisfaction of Einstein discovering E=mc2. But when I heard that Ted Danson was now in charge, I couldn’t resist checking it out. That’s because Danson is enjoying one of those great late-career resurgences that brightens everything he touches. He’s shone as a grumpy-funny version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, kept Bored to Death afloat with his sly portrait of editor George Christopher, and made a stupendously good villain on Damages, playing a tycoon all the more villainous because he thinks he’s actually a victim. Nobody carries himself like a wealthy man with more ease than Danson.

He brings that same crowd-pleasing suavity to CSI, where he plays the unit’s new boss, D.B. Russell, who unsettles his time which (so far, anyway) isn’t quite sure whether he’s a hard man playing at being warm or a warm one who’ll suddenly nail you with his toughness. Whatever the case, he does all the oddball stuff that brilliant detectives do—lying supine on the floor of a tram car, using the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” to crack a murder, and, shades of Lieutenant Columbo, taking phone calls from his wife about topics that sound more bourgeois bohemian than LVPD. Danson pulls off these scenes with such effortless ease that the rest of the cast appears to be reinvigorated, if only because they’re acting with a star who brings a delightful new energy to the same old thing. Amidst all the bullet-cam special effects and lines of clunky dialogue (“The DNA matches!”), Danson offers CSI something it’s never had before—a genuinely light touch.

The first episode of Case Histories debuts on MASTERPIECE MYSTERY! on Sunday, October 16, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on PBS.